Commenter imag had a trenchant take on why Elon Musk's Tesla Motors is running short of cash:

he problem is Elon's approach to innovation. Innovation means looking carefully at where preceeding approaches have failed, and trying to improve on them. It usually doesn't mean pretending that the same rules don't apply to you (although, in the lone case of PayPal, they didn't, because of the internet). I think it's a case of people assuming that intelligence can replace wisdom. In the end, experience does matter; history repeats itself; rules can be carefully changed only if you knew what they were to start out with.